Shopify is one of the largest eCommerce platforms in the world, with brands like Gymshark, Kylie Cosmetics and Kardashian Kloset all using it to sell online. Its appeal lies in the ability to combine ease of use with enterprise-scale capabilities, making it a popular choice for merchants of all sizes.
According to TAMI, there are roughly 13,000 UK and Irish retailers using Shopify to sell and ship products across Ireland. If you’re one of those merchants, you’ve probably noticed something missing: built-in address autocomplete at checkout.
Below is an example of what happens when you start typing an Irish address on a Shopify website. No suggestions appear, so each address must be entered manually:
This leaves merchants having to deal with the consequences later, such as manual address corrections, delayed shipments and, even failed deliveries in some cases.
So what can you do if it’s not possible to solve the problem at checkout? The answer is actually what customers see after they’ve placed their order: the Thank You page.
The challenge facing Irish Shopify merchants
For most eCommerce businesses, address quality is easy to overlook…until it starts to cause problems. A customer might enter an address that looks correct, only for an issue to be discovered later on. Perhaps the Eircode is wrong, an apartment number is missing, or the address is incomplete and doesn’t match a deliverable location.
At that point, the customer has already left your website. The problem may not be discovered until the order reaches fulfilment, leaving your team scrambling to resolve the issue against shipping deadlines. That often means contacting the customer, delaying the shipment or making a judgement call and hoping the courier can complete the delivery. None of these outcomes are ideal.
Why merchants can’t always solve this at checkout
If your website is built on Shopify Plus, you have more flexibility. The checkout can be customised and integrate with external plugins that provide autocomplete suggestions as the customer types their address. This is the ideal scenario, as everything happens before the order is placed and the addresses being captured are complete and accurate.
Unfortunately this isn’t an option for merchants on Shopify Basic, Grow and Advanced plans due to restrictions with checkout customisation. It’s even more frustrating for Irish merchants because Shopify’s native address lookup doesn’t cover Ireland (see the full list of supported countries here). Unless customers are using a digital wallet such as Shop Pay or PayPal, every single shipping address entered on the checkout form has to be captured manually. Shopify does perform some validation of Eircodes, helping to catch certain errors during checkout. However, incorrect Eircodes can still slip through if they appear valid but don’t actually correspond to the address entered by the customer.
A different approach: verifying addresses on the confirmation page
The good news is that the checkout isn’t the only place where you can check and verify addresses. Shopify’s Thank You page gives merchants one last chance to interact with customers before the fulfilment process. Instead of waiting for issues to be discovered internally or via delivery partners, addresses can be checked immediately after the order has been placed.
How the Autoaddress Shopify extension works
The Autoaddress no-code plugin runs in the background of the Thank You page immediately after a customer has checked out.
As soon as an order is placed, the shipping address is automatically verified using the Autoaddress API. If any issues are identified, the customer is presented with a suggested correction and can update their address before leaving the website. This goes beyond simple Eircode validation. Our API doesn’t just check that an Eircode is correctly formatted—it verifies that the Eircode actually corresponds to the address entered by the customer. This helps to identify issues that standard checkout validation might miss.
For example, a customer could enter a valid address but accidentally mistype their Eircode. As both appear correct in isolation, the error may go unnoticed until the order reaches the fulfilment stage of the process. By checking the address and Eircode together on the Thank You page, the customer now has a chance to confirm the correct information. The updated address is then stored against the order, avoiding unnecessary manual intervention later on.
Why this is especially useful for digital wallets
When customers check out using Shop Pay, PayPal, etc, the shipping address is pulled directly from their account rather than being entered on the checkout form directly (read more about digital wallets here). This creates a faster and more convenient checkout experience, but it also means that merchants have fewer opportunities to verify that the address is accurate and correct before the order is fulfilled.
The address stored in a digital wallet isn’t always the address the customer wants the order delivered to. They may have moved house, are sending a gift to someone else, or simply forgotten to update an old delivery address. In many cases, the wallet’s default address is used automatically without the customer giving it a second thought. The Autoaddress plugin provides one final opportunity to review that information. If the address contains errors, missing details or inconsistencies, the customer can correct them immediately rather than being contacted later by customer service or fulfilment teams.
See it in action
If you’re shipping to customers in Ireland or the UK, you can install the Autoaddress plugin app directly from the Shopify App Store and instantly start validating shipping addresses on the Thank You page. All installations include a 7-day free trial.
